Krebs on Security

In-depth security news and investigation

Posts Tagged: spotify

Last week, security firm DirectDefense came under fire for over-hyping claims that Cb Response, a cybersecurity product sold by competitor Carbon Black, was leaking proprietary data from customers who use it. Carbon Black responded that the bug identified by its competitor was a feature, and that customers were amply cautioned in advance about the potential privacy risks of using the feature. Now Carbon Black is warning that an internal review has revealed a wholly separate bug in Cb Response that could in fact result in some customers unintentionally sharing sensitive files.

As noted in last week’s story, DirectDefense warned about a problem with Cb Response’s use of Google’s VirusTotal — a free tool that lets anyone submit a suspicious file and have it scanned against dozens of commercial anti-malware tools. There is also a paid version of VirusTotal that allows customers to examine any file uploaded to the service.

Numerous industry analysts leapt to Carbon Black’s defense — with some even calling “bullshit” on the findings — pointing out that plenty of other vendors submit files through Virustotal and that DirectDefense was merely trying to besmirch a competitor’s product.

But earlier this week, Carbon Black began quietly notifying customers that an internal review of the claims revealed a completely different bug that could result in some benign customer files being miscategorized as executable files and inadvertently uploaded to Virustotal for scanning.

“On Thursday, we discovered a bug affecting a small percentage of our Cb Response customers,” said Mike Viscuso, co-founder and chief technology officer at Carbon Black. “Our review is still ongoing, but based on what we learned to date it requires a very specific customer configuration, and we have already taken steps to remediate the bug and protect our customers.” Continue reading →

Normally, if one wishes to buy stolen account credentials for paid online services like Netflix, Hulu, XBoxLive or Spotify, the buyer needs to visit a cybercrime forum or drop into a dark Web marketplace that only accepts Bitcoin as payment. Increasingly, however, these accounts are showing up for sale at Payivy[dot]com, an open Web marketplace that happily accepts PayPal in exchange for a variety of stolen accounts.

A PayIvy seller advertising Netflix accounts for a dollar apiece. Unlike most sites selling hacked accounts, this one takes PayPal.

Marketed and sold by a Hackforums user named “Sh1eld” as a supposed method of selling ebooks and collecting payments for affiliate marketers, PayIvy has instead become a major conduit for hawking stolen accounts and credentials for a range of top Web services.

There is no central index of items for sale via PayIvy per se, but this catalog of cached sales threads offers a fairly representative glimpse: License keys for Adobe and Microsoft software products, user account credentials in bulk for services like Hulu, Netflix, Spotify, DirecTV and HBO Go, as well as a raft of gaming accounts at Origin, Steam, PlayStation and XBox Live. Other indexes at archive.is and PayIvy’s page at Reddit reveal similar results.

It’s not clear how or why PayPal isn’t shutting down most of these merchants, but some of the sellers clearly are testing things to see how far they can push it: In just five minutes of searching online, I found several PayIvy sellers who were accepting PayPal payments via PayIvy for…wait for it…hijacked PayPal accounts! The fact that PayIvy takes PayPal as payment means that buyers can purchase hacked accounts with [stolen] credit cards — or, worse yet, stolen PayPal accounts.

Jack Christin, Jr., associate general counsel at PayPal, said while the site itself is not in violation of its Acceptable Use Policies (AUP), there have been cases where PayPal has identified accounts selling goods that violate its policy and in those cases, the company has exited those merchants from its system. Continue reading →